His Unknown Wife by Louis Tracy (little readers .TXT) 📕

On five separate occasions they had found themselves strung out on a narrow ledge which merged to nothingness in the sheer wall of a precipice. Five times had they to go back and essay a different path, often beginning again fifty or even a hundred feet below the point they had reached. They were obliged to drag or carry the heavy topmast every inch of the way, because, without its aid, either as a bridge or a ladder, they could never have surmounted a tithe of the obstacles encountered.

In those eleven awful hours they had climbed not two, but five hundred feet, a distance which, on the level, a good runner would traverse in about twenty seconds, whereas it took them an average of a minute to climb one foot.

The marvel was that the women could have done it at all, even with the help which both men gave unstintedly. During the last weary hours no one uttered an unnecessary word. Each of the four was determined to go on, not for his or her own sake, but for the sake of the others. They were roped together. If one fell, it meant disaster to all. So, with splendid grit, each resolved not to fall so long as hand would hold or food lodge on the tiniest projection.

But, with final success, came utter collapse. Even Maseden, far stronger physically than Sturgess, fell like a log. True, he had borne far more than his share of the day’s toil. No matter what his inmost thoughts, he had never, to outward seeming, lost heart. It was he who always found the new line, he who earliest decided to turn back and try again.

It was he, too, who called now for renewed exertion after some minutes of complete and blissful repose.

“Sorry to disturb your siesta,” he cried, witha woful assumption of cheery confidence, “but we must reach the shore, if possible, before night falls. Oysters and Chablis await us there. En avant, messieurs et ‘dames!”

Nina Forbes sat up and brushed the hair from her eyes.

“I don’t think I can walk another yard. Won’t you leave me here?” she demanded.

“No.”

“Are we to carry that mast with us?”

“Why not? We may need it.”

Her eyes followed Maseden’s down the slope. Compared with the sullen, frowning realm of rock they had quitted, this eastern side of the island resembled a Paradise. The moss on which they were resting was thick and wiry. A hundred feet beneath were fir-trees, sparse and stunted at first, but soon growing luxuriantly, yet promising, to Maseden’s weighing eye, a barrier nearly as formidable as the fearsome wall of rock they had just surmounted.

He knew that which was happily hidden from the others. In this wild land, seldom, if ever, trodden by the foot of man, the forests throve on the bones of their own dead progenitors. Aged trees fell and rotted where they lay, and the roots of newcomers found substance among the heaped-up logs. Gales and landslides helped to swell the mad jumble of decaying trunks, which formed an impassable layer hardly ever less than fifteen feet in depth and often going beyond thirty feet.

Of the two, Maseden believed he would sooner tackle another wall of rock rather than essay to cross that belt of fantastic growths.

But, down there was water—perhaps food—certainly shelter. He guessed that at an altitude where hardy Alpine mosses alone flourished the cold would be intense at night. Already there was a shrewd nip in the breeze. They must not dawdle another instant.

He made up his mind to head for a gap in the trees which seemed to mark a recent landslip, and trust to fortune that the gradient might not be too steep. Better any open risk than the fall of perhaps the whole party into a pit of dead wood choked with fetid and noisome fungus growths. Once caught in such a trap, they might never emerge.

And now they met with their greatest among many pieces of luck that day. The opening Maseden had noticed was not the track of an avalanche, but a rough water-course, through which the torrential rain-storms of the coast tumbled headlong to the sea.

Notwithstanding the long-continued gale, the descent was so steep that only a vestige of a stream trickled down the main gully. Here and there lay a pool. Though the water was brackish, it was strongly pigmented with iron, and the roots of vigorous young trees seemed to find sustenance in it.

At any rate, they must drink or die, so they drank, though Maseden warned them to be moderate. They laved their wounds, which were intensely sore at first, owing to the encrustation of salt on their skins. But here, again, nature’s surgery, if painful, was effective. Salt is a rough and ready antiseptic. None of them owned any real medical knowledge. In their hard case ignorance was surely bliss, because they must have had the narrowest of escapes from tetanus.

The descent, though trying, was not specially perilous. Three times did the mast bring them down small cataracts, and many times across extraordinarily ingenious log barriers, set up against the stress of falling water by nature’s own engineering methods.

Once, indeed, a heavy boulder, poised in unexpected balance, toppled over just as they had reached the base of a waterfall. It would have crushed Nina Forbes to a pulp had not Maseden seen the stone move. As it was, he snatched her aside, and a ton of rock crashed harmlessly on to the very spot where she had been standing the fifth part of a second earlier.

Such an incident, happening in civilized surroundings, would have been regarded as phenomenal, something akin to an escape from a train wreck. Here it passed as a mere item in the day’s trials. It did not even shake the girl’s nerve.

“I suppose I ought to say ‘thank you,’ but I’m not quite sure you have done me a service,” she murmured wearily.

Hitherto both she and her sister had been so brave, so uncomplaining, that Maseden took warning from the words. The two girls were at the extreme limit of their powers of endurance, mentally and physically. It was five o ‘clock in the evening. After a day and a night of passive misery they had been subjected to every sort of muscular strain during nearly twelve hours, and might collapse at any moment now.

“Courage!” he said, with a gentleness curiously in contrast with the rather gruff and hectoring manner he had adopted all day. “You haven’t noticed how near the sea is. We shall be on shore in a few minutes.”

The girl’s lips parted in a wan smile.

“You are wonderful,” was all she said, but the pathos underlying the tribute wrung his heart.

Somehow, anyhow, they slithered and dropped down the remaining steps of their Calvary. During the last few feet they were able to leave behind the friendly topmast, but the shadows were falling when they stood, forlornly triumphant, on the flat rocks which served as the beach of the estuary.

The two girls sank at once to a moss-covered boulder. They looked so deathly white beneath the tan of exposure and the crust of dirt and blood not altogether removed when they bathed their faces in the pool, that Maseden unstrapped the poncho which he carried slung to his shoulders and produced from its folds that thrice-precious bottle of brandy.

The patients weakly resisted his demand that they should share nearly the whole of the mouthful of spirit which remained; but he was firm, and they drank. Sturgess, who staggered and nearly fell when he tried to move after the brief halt, was given a few drops; Maseden himself had what was left. Then he filled the bottle with water, and each took a long drink.

There is this supreme virtue in water, that, while slaking thirst, it stays the worst pangs of hunger, and Maseden had enough strength in reserve to hurry off in search of oysters, or any sort of shell-fish, before daylight failed wholly. He was fortunate in finding a well-stocked bed almost at once.

He alone knew what agony he endured when his bruised and torn fingers were plunged into ice-cold salt water. But he persevered, and gathered such a quantity that in ten minutes he and his companions were enjoying a really satisfying meal.

While they ate, they examined their surroundings. It was half tide. A bleak, rocky foreshore provided at least an ideal breeding ground for oysters. Behind them rose the solemn bank of pine-trees through which they had come. On the right, only half a mile away, stood the great shoulder of rock which shut out the Pacific on that northern side of the estuary. In front, two miles or more distant, lay a jumble of forests and wild hills, and a similar vista spread far to the left, because the estuary widened to a span of several miles.

It was, indeed, a wild, desolate, awe-inspiring land, a territory abandoned of mankind! In such regions old-time sailors found fearsome monsters, amphibious reptiles larger than ships, and gnomes of demoniac aspect.

Such visions were easy to conjure up. Nina Forbes saw one now in the dusk.

“Oh, what is that?” she cried, in genuine alarm, gazing seaward with terror-laden eyes.

It took some time to unmask the strange denizen of the deep which she had discovered. Three seals, lying in a row on a flat rock, looked remarkably like the accepted pictures of a sea serpent, but the illusion was destroyed when one of the creatures dived, followed, in turn, by each of the others, in one, two, three order.

“We must rise before dawn tomorrow,” said Maseden. “Seals are good to eat. You and I, Sturgess, can cut one off when the pack comes on shore.”

“Seals may be good to eat, but they will also be hard to eat if we are unable to cook them,” put in Madge.

“There were times to-day when I could have eaten seal cooked or uncooked,” admitted Nina.

“Probably such times will recur tomorrow,” said Maseden. “You will soon grow tired of oysters for every meal. Did you ever hear of the sailing ship which took a cargo of bottled porter from Dublin to Cape Town? After crossing the line she was caught in a gale, disabled, and carried hundreds of miles out of her course. She ran short of water, so, during three wretched weeks, officers and crew drank stout for breakfast, dinner and supper. When, at last, the vessel reached Table Bay, if porter was suggested as a beverage to any member of the ship’s company there was instant trouble.”

“Still,” said Madge thoughtfully, “I don’t think I shall like raw seal…. You are very clever, Mr. Maseden. You must find some means of making a fire.”

Maseden glanced up at the darkening sky.

“At present the pressing problem is where are we to sleep,” he said.

“Under the deodars,” suggested Sturgess promptly.

“Yes, I suppose so. But we must make haste.”

“If you ask me to put up any sort of hustle, I’ll crack into small fragments,” said Sturgess, rising to his feet slowly and stiffly.

But this young American-a typical New Yorker in every inch-was blessed with a valiant heart. He helped Maseden to break and cut small branches of the fragrant pines, and pile them beneath the largest tree they could find on a comparatively level piece of ground above highwater mark. The two girls were half carried to this soft couch, which invited sharp comparison with the wet, slimy rock of the previous night.

Despite their protests, they